During manufacture of printed circuit boards and other electronic circuitry, connectors carrying a plurality of contacts are mounted to the circuitry by such methods as through-hole mounting and surface mount technology. Typically, it is desirable to robotically place connector housings to a printed circuit board by aligning contact tines with through-holes or on to the solder pads of the printed circuit board before soldering thereto. The contact tines of the contacts within the connector housing are subsequently soldered to the board, resulting in a connector half which is prepared to receive a complimentary mating connector.
During this assembly process, it is important to ensure that the contact portions of the connector housing which will be mating with the complimentary connector are protected from damage and free from any dust or foreign debris. Consequently, covers or cap housings may be employed to carry the connectors and protect the contacts.
Also, as these connector housings are typically robotically placed on the printed circuit boards, it is an advantage to align and place more than one connector housing on the board at the same time. Accordingly, cap housings have been designed to carry more than one connector housing at once.
While carrying multiple connector housings and placing them on a printed circuit at one time provides the obvious advantage of reducing assembly time, the disadvantage of coplanarity problems may lead to non-filled or partially-filled soldered joints.
Often, multiple connectors are positioned onto a printed circuit board in extremely tight quarters which requires placement within very narrow tolerances. Thus, where the surface of a printed circuit board may be characterized as extending in the x- and y-direction and the z-direction extends perpendicularly to the board surface, connectors must be placed onto the board in such a way that the connectors adhere strictly to x- and y-direction location requirements while accommodating irregularities in the topography of the board which affect seating in the z-direction. When multiple connectors are carried by one cap housing and are placed on a board simultaneously, each connector encounters minor variations in the topography of the board which may not be encountered by the other connector or connectors carried by the same cap housing. However, since the connectors are rigidly held within the cap housing, the seating of one connector in the z-direction will be identically repeated by all other connectors carried by the cap housing. It is this coplanarity problem that leads to unreliable solder joints. As such, it would be desirable to provide a cap housing which carries and protects multiple connector housings, allowing their simultaneous installation onto a printed circuit board or electronic circuitry while allowing each connector to float within the cap housing and individually self-level on the board, thereby avoiding coplanarity problems.